Page 26 of Echoes

They lowered the cargo net ROV attachment, which had carried the item up to the ship, and Rosie leaned over it, taking a look at the object that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Itdidlook like a briefcase, but maybe one of those silver metal ones that locked, and it was probably three times as thick as a standard metal briefcase. It looked like one that might carry something important to an eventthat needed to be secured and protected.

“Weird,” Rosie said as she moved around the object. “Let’s move it to a table inside. Nothing historical about this, but I’d still like to take it back with us.”

“No problem, Doc,” the technician replied.

Rosie had no idea what a finding like this one would be doing in the wreckage of an old ship, but these waters were much more traversed these days than they had been in the seventeenth century, so it could be anything. There had been a few plane crashes around the area over the years, so she supposed it could’ve been debris from one of those, but she’d need Herman to help her figure out which one was most likely.

It couldn’t be much older than the past ten or twenty years. There was minimal to no rust damage. In fact, Rosie was surprised to see that there were hardly any scuff marks. While crashing into the water likely wouldn’t leave any, the currents at the bottom of the ocean certainly would. Storms would’ve dragged that thing all over the place down there, and it would be marked up and rusty had it been there for long.

Deciding to not open it on ship because she wasn’t sure what was inside and didn’t want to take any chances until they could get to land, Rosie had it packaged up and sent back to the office, where they could X-ray it first and get a better idea of what it was. It didn’t look dangerous from the outside, but it was certainly big enough to hold something that could potentially do damage, so they boxed it up safely and, a few days later, headed back to port, where she’d spend the next few months examining all the objects they brought up, along with the footage of the wreck, to either confirm or change the historical record about this ship going down in a storm.

Five Days Later

She wasn’t supposed to bring her work home with her. Every item they pulled up from the ship was supposed to stay at the lab, where it could be kept and conserved. But this strange briefcase thing wasn’t part of the ship; it was something else, and Rosie needed to know what was inside it. They’d run it through the X-ray the day before, not prioritizing it over the actual objects of historical significance, and she’d gotten a look inside for the first time. Unfortunately, the X-ray hadn’t revealed much. The object looked almost like a boomerang, but not at the same time. It was definitely metallic and seemed to have something like a cord or cable hanging out the back of it. Or, maybe it was the front. She couldn’t really tell from the images.

She’d had one of the techs who usually worked modern warfare shipwrecks and knew about ordinance from all the major wars take a look at it, but he had no idea what it was. All he’d been able to tell her was that there wasn’t anything that looked like it could explode inside. Rosie knew better, but there was just something about this random thing she’d found at the bottom of the ocean that had her intrigued even more than the things she was supposed to be cataloging with her team.

Spending the better part of her life in school and earning a Ph.D. by twenty-six because she’d started college a few years earlier than most, Rosie had been highly requested as a marine archaeologist. Her published papers had been game-changing for the historical record of three major sites around the world. She’d been asked to examine two shipwrecks from the Viking Age, and one was not where it was supposed to be, altering what scholars and scientists had previously believed about the Viking’s primary pillaging routes. Then, there had been the site in London, where they’d found old Roman docks and roads under the modern city. The location where she’d found a ship’s hull couldn’t have been where a ship could have been on the water because the river hadn’t flowed through there even during the Roman times when its path had been different from the river today. She’d discovered that it was there because the Romans had actually built their own inlet to allow for more vessels to enter and leave. A major port, it couldn’t be called, but an inlet made more sense. Later, she’d located one of the most famous undiscoveredshipwrecks in history, and it had been a full seventy-four miles away from where they’d thought it had gone down in the sixteenth century. She’d had to work hard to find that one, but the ship had been all wood and hadn’t been large compared to the ships of the day, which meant it had easily been carried off by the currents, and she’d needed to research to discover where it could’ve ended up. Finding it had solved a mystery, and that was the part of her job that she loved.

Finding objects was exciting, yes, but she liked solving the mysteries around why a vessel had gone down in the first place. If it was missing, why wasn’t it where they’d expected to find it? Of course, if there was something onboard the ship that people had been trying to find for centuries, she wanted to find it, but she liked solving the puzzles more.

This box and this thing inside it were puzzles to her, and so she’d taken it home. Now, she had it on her kitchen counter, and she was holding bolt cutters in her hands, waiting to unlock the large padlock and get a real look at the object.

“Are you supposed to bring that home?”

“Oh, hi,” she said, quickly moving the bolt cutters behind her back. “I didn’t knowyouwere here.”

“It’s Monday. I pick you up and take you to the office whenever you’re home. It’s my way of paying you without actually paying you for that mentorship you promised,” Felicity replied.

“It’s Monday?”

Felicity laughed and said, “Yes, it’s Monday. Did you lose track of time again?”

“I just thought it was Sunday,” she replied.

“Is that why you have something strange-looking on your kitchen counter?” Felicity asked, walking over. “And bolt cutters behind your back.”

“We found this on the expedition,” Rosie revealed and set the bolt cutters down next to the briefcase.

“I gathered.” Felicity sat on one of the stools then and looked at it. “What is it? I know I don’t have my Ph.D. yet, but that doesn’t exactly scream seventeenth century to me.”

Rosie laughed a little and said, “It’s not. It was just there, resting on the hull, and we brought it back.”

“Andyoubrought it home?”

“I wanted to open it alone.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just did. Can’t really explain it. It’s been cataloged, and we also ran an X-ray. It’s not dangerous, from what we can tell.”

“From what you cantell? So, you don’t know?” Felicity stood abruptly.

“If you’re scared of what’s in this box, you’ll never make it onboard a ship.”

“Hey, I’m working on it,” the woman replied but still took a few steps back.

“Felicity, you could just be an archaeologist. You don’t have to be amarinearchaeologist.”

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